Rather than start off by introducing myself, I thought I would start off by introducing my current Alembic. I call her the "Little Redhead" and she's a 91 Essence with a red translucent finish. Sorry, don't have any pics. I've had her about 4 or 5 years now I guess.

When I bought her, I was staying in a hotel and I didn't have any amp in the room, only a Pocket Rocket headphone amp. I did however have my laptop with Cakewalk Pro on it. I have always tried to make it a habit to run a recorder while I practice, since I find that the free improvisation sometimes leads to things which I might like to remember for later exploration or development, and for some reason when I improv, I always have a hard time recalling exactly what it was I played while in the zone. The recordings help me remember.

Now, what I did was to run the headphone out to the laptop mic in, and, as I figured it would, it created the most truly horrible noise from the signal mismatch. The Pocket Rocket has chorus and distortion circuits, and so I figured "what the hell", since the signal was so completely roached anyway, it couldn't get any worse, and I was bound and determined to record my getting acquainted session with the Little Redhead, so I just flipped on both the chorus and distortion and cranked everything up to max.

The sound however, wasn't as intolerable as I thought it would be, and after a while I started to get a mood from it.

Overall, I recorded about two hours of this noise, but I knew that somewhere in there I had heard something which might be of interest to a buddy of mine who plays heavy metal guitar. So I went back through the recording and cut out a couple of minutes to use as a "scratch track" to email to my buddy to see if he thought it might work as rough outline for a heavy metal piece, or if there was anything there that might fit into something else.

Sorry to make you read all of that, but it's important to understand that this recording is in no way carefully crafted; it is merely a candid shot of me and the Little Redhead getting acquainted, and was never intended as something anyone else would ever hear. It is not a composition.

But you are Alembic junkies as I am, so I don't mind throwing this out just for kicks.

There is a little hesitation and then a hiccup right in middle, where I started out on a riff, but a new direction was oozing into my head, and then I just sort of froze for a second while it flashed before my eyes. This is the way it goes with improvisation - you have to let it take you where it wants to go.

Okay, so now that that's out of the way, here is a link to that horrible little scratch track. No matter how bad the signal was though, you can still hear the Little Readhead's fiery soul shining through.